Asking this here instead of asklemmy because its a political question
Recently I find Hayao Miyazaki as an influential person who has shaped my progressive / left leaning views and I want to what influential thing or person helped shaped or start your progressive / left leaning views.
For me the most influential was Matt Bruenig. He’s extremely knowledgeable about Nordic model socialism as well as the building of a good welfare state.
Specifically, his explanations about how the way people frame welfare program is incorrect as it’s not a vehicle of Socialism itself. As a TL;DR, people incorrectly assume it’s about vertical redistribution (high income to low income), where the correct way to frame it is horizontal redistribution (e.g. a single lawyer that only has to take care of themselves and a lawyer who has 3 kids, a disabled sibling, and two elderly parents that they have to take care of should be able to live similar lifestyles).
He’s also a labor lawyer and knows basically everything there is to know about the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), so it’s helped reframe a lot of modern issues for me into a labor mindset.
He has a lot of stuff posted on The People’s Policy Project as well as his personal website Matt Bruenig Dot Com. He also does a Podcast with his wife, Liz who is a great writer with the Atlantic and another lefty, where they end up talking about a lot of this stuff. The podcast feed also has in it a Socialism Series where Matt goes through the “canon” of socialist thought like Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, John Francis Bray, etc.